Growing a Blog Business – October 4, 2008

By dougnau on Oct 4, 2008 in Blog Growth

September brought about a couple setbacks in recording my audio book – essentially my microphone went on the fritz and I had to get a new one. Setbacks cleared away now and I am on target for an October release of both the e-book and audio book. Here’s a quick update on growing the blog business.

Updates for September

Again no new technology updates for the website – as I look to release the e-book, I anticipate quite a few additions to be made in the month of October. I’ll be taking a number of days off from the Wellness Coaching day job to complete the website improvements to make the delivery of this product possible. Here are some accomplishments this month.

Added 8 new blog posts to the website
Delivered monthly newsletter
Registered and posted 2 articles on (Striving But Never Arriving – Creating Long Term Goals and Working through Deflections) to four article submission directories (EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, SelfGrowth.com and AccomplishLife.com)
Completed recording three chapters of audio book

Learnings/Observations

i-grow.net now has 2 articles in the top 10 of Google for searches with the keywords wellness coach and wellness coaching. This has started pushing quite a bit more traffic to the site in the month of October. A personal goal of mine is to be the #1 Wellness Coaching resource on the web as well as the #1 Life Coaching Resource on the web, so this is a great move in that direction.

Here are detailed website results from August:

According to Google Analytics, here is my unique visitor results for the past 3 months.

July - Unique Visitors

August - Unique Visitors

September - Unique Visitors

September showed my largest gain in traffic for any month to date. It jumped about 250 visitors. Right now the site seems to be averaging between 20 and 30 visitors per day. Compared to 2-3 per day about 6 months ago, I’ll take these results!

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s

July - Ad Revenue

August- Ad Revenue

September - Ad Revenue

Again click through rates seem to be consistent at 1.3%. I am certainly not making a living off $14.50/month but its almost double what I was making 2 months ago. Google pays out at $100 – I am expecting to make $100 this year – not bad for about 1000 hours of work!

Alexa Ranking

My Alexa rank continues to grow as well – as you’d expect with the increased traffic. Its jumped up over another 100k spots as my previous months ranking was 763,712. At this point I am not sure how many visitors are needed to break into the 500k mark, 600k seems to be around 550 unique visitors/month.

Google Page Rank

I usually don’t mention this but my Google page rank finally moved up to 2. I am not sure what did it, its been steady at 1 pretty much since I started the site – Perhaps a few more inbound links are coming to my website.

Goals Moving Forward

October

Record Audio Book
Complete final draft revisions of e-book with cover
Post audio book and e-book to website
Redesign home page and ancillary pages
Submit 2 articles to 3 article directories

Long Term Goals

Continue writing at a pace of 6 articles per month (2008 goal of 100 articles)
Continue developing 1/2 podcast per month (2008 goal of 7 podcasts)
Continue writing one newsletter per month
Create a more user friendly archives page - filterable by category
develop a free e-book to give out to people as an incentive for subscribing to my newsletter
Deliver audio version of free e-book
Improve performance of database queries to pull up blog information
Optimize website to improve click through rate

Looking forward to providing another update in October!

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